Lepre's art stuff @hdlepre - Tumblr Blog

The whole point of power levels in Dragon Ball is that they are wrong and stupid and an expression of an evil mind.

They are introduced in the Saiyan saga with Raditz, representing the true intrusion of sci-fi into the general fantasy vibe of the series. DB always had tech elements, but this is when shit gets space and biotechy for a long time until the Boo saga.

Anyway, Raditz reads power levels and he's like "okay this immutable number means I'm stronger and I win" but then whoops turns out the Dragon Ball protagonists cannot be quantified because their power is not a scientific measure, it is an expression of their passion, heart, determination; their heroic qualities. Get Special Beam Cannon'd about it, idiot.

Second verse same as the first, Vegeta shows up and he's like "blah blah superior elite Saiyan warrior, Kakarot" and now power levels are an expression of a repressive hierarchical class system that proscribes inferiority and superiority, a genetic destiny that can never be overcome.

But oops turns out Dragon Ball protagonists cannot be quantified etc, and also class hierarchies are bullshit, get Kaioken'd about it, loser!

Third verse: Namek Saga. Frieza's intergalactic empire runs on hierarchical oppression codified in power levels, and in Vegeta's confrontation with Kiwi, Kiwi is confident that Vegeta is not a real threat because they have the same power level of 10.000. But oops Vegeta has been to earth and he has been touched by the fantasy, and now it turns out he is a protagonist who cannot be quantified, get energy blasted about it, numbnuts.

This is also how Vegeta begins to transition from villain into a heroic figure: he begins to give up on obsessing over quantified power levels and embraces his passions, heart, determination as sources of his strength.

Anyway yadda yadda Frieza is space Napoleon-Hitler, etc etc avatar of inherent superiority and hierarchy encoded in power level, blah blah get Super Saiyan'd about it, dipshit.

The Super Saiyan is a power that is accessed by deeply caring, it is a power of myth and legends, it is fantasy overcoming and destroying sci-fi, as literalised by the progressive destruction of quantifiable "power levels" as a construct.

So the story is saying:

Power levels are dumb bullshit invented by evil minded people to enforce shitty hierarchies. They suck and everyone who believes in them sucks and trying to measure the power of a hero with a number is an attempt to destroy fantasy as a genre.

...

On an entirely unrelated note, huge portions of the anime community are obsessed with measuring the power of heroes with numbers.

derrickwildsun-deactivated20250

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

sci-fantasy

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)

transhuman-priestess

Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

This is true of all censorship.

brady-like-the-bunch

I’ve been a professional designer for 8 years and that last bit is so true. In addition to politics, a huge part of people meddling with creative work is just ego. They want to feel like they had a hand in the final product, even though they not only did not create it but are in fact incapable of creating something on that level. So they reach their hand into someone else’s work and command it to change, not in service of a mutual artistic goal, but simply because they have the power to do so and they like feeling that power.

ohnoitstbskyen

Beyond personal ego, it’s also a matter of structural incentives and identity.

Imagine this: your job is to be a “censor” - whether that’s an actual agent of state censorship or a “stakeholder” or a producer or a middle manager. Doesn’t matter. Your job is to be someone who makes Appropriate Changes™ to creative work as a part of the creative process.

Now let’s say you work with artists who produce entirely inoffensive output that really doesn’t need any changes from you. Work which is entirely acceptable as it is, and which nobody would bat an eyelash at if it got published. Nobody would have a problem with it. Nobody would say “oh the censor failed to catch that one.”

If you just give the go-ahead to everything that comes across your desk, you are, objectively speaking, being unproductive. The product you are supposed to produce, the service you are supposed to provide, the function of your labor, is to make Appropriate Changes™ to things. If you are not making Appropriate Changes™, you are failing to do your job. You are being lazy, you are being ineffective, you are failing to do the work you were hired to do.

You don’t want to feel that way, and you don’t want to feel useless, so…

And this isn’t always even straight up malicious or egotistical, so much as it is a case of “when all you have is a hammer.” Even if there are no Appropriate Changes to make, you are conscious that your job is to make Appropriate Changes, and the entire lens through which you view the creative work that comes across your desk is “I must find Appropriate Changes to make to this, or else I am useless!”

That’s why the distraction gambit works so well here - if you give people something they can make Appropriate Changes™ to, then you satisfy their need to Do Their Job, and once THAT is out of the way, they won’t apply that same level of needful, box-ticking scrutiny to the rest of it.

The nature of the job itself incentivizes interfering with work that doesn’t need changes - in fact it often requires you to do so, lest your numbers look bad on your next performance review.

Even the nicest, most collaborative and creative soul can become a meddling busy-body if you put them in a job where their metric of success is measured in how much they meddle and interfere with the work of other people.

Of course, it’s also a kind of job which rewards people for being egotistical meddling busy-bodies by nature, and it is a job in which egotistical meddling busy-bodies have a natural advantage for flourishing, but it’s important to understand that it’s not JUST about individuals personally being egotistical assholes, there’s a structure which is shaping the behaviour as well.

pigeon3gg

drawfee is such a good channel because everyone contains so many multitudes what do you MEAN julia "count the posts" "im using blender" lepetit is the same person who drew that bobby hill. insanity

ash-rigby

"women are always like—"

"men are always like—"

shut up shut up shut up shut up shutupshutupshutupsHUT UP 🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄🐄 gender essentialism-hating herd of cows running you over

ash-rigby

sorry I’m not leaving this in the tags

marinella-ela

drtanner

The soft eyes! The forward facing ears! The question mark tail! Not to mention the poise and control! This little dude is having a blast and is SO good at it!!

black spotted tabby

(Source)

this is the greatest night in the history of this sport

mhalachai

my favorite part of this is the announcer saying "i'm not entirely sure what's happening here" because we all know what's happening here but they can't say that on AEW primetime

thisfuckingdork

Finishing this off the CE2 balatro pack with the Kings. This was a lot of fun to do and I like what I ended up with (: Bonus Whole Pack:

luxims

doodles

witchrealms

bats photographed by josé gabriel martinez

(x)

thisfuckingdork

"He reaches the Red Ace, it has grown an eye"

plorkart

alternate timeline where they live happily ever after

thisfuckingdork

Cape Escape 2 Finale sketch pages

What a fun ride this season has been. Excited to see what comes next! But in the meantime, given that I have sketch pages for Deadlaws and CE2, I might have to go back to CE1 to complete the sketch page trilogy :P (once I get the time to of course)